PokePrice

I re-checked and published the PokéPrice GlideApp app and configured the analytics in GA. Everything was working as expected so I headed over to Facebook.

I posted a message to the Facebook group containing a link to the app with a short message explaining the PokéPrice tool.

My expectation was to get a few likes and possibly some comments about the tool that I could answer and hopefully stimulate some discussion.

Within 10 minutes of posting I had over 85 people on the platform, 12 comments and around 40 likes.

I spent the rest of the day/evening replying to comments, explaining how the data is captured and receiving a large number of requests for more sets.

By the end of day 1 I had amassed 465 app users, 199 comments and 145 likes from 1 Facebook post.

Now that I had a bunch of data I wanted to be able to get a proof of concept out to the Facebook community to get their feedback.

The quickest way I could see this happening was to output data into Google sheets and build a GlideApp.

I wanted to validate the concept without having to upgrade my GlideApp site so I decided to launch with 1 collection to sit beneath the 500-row paywall.

To keep the pricing data 'live' I pushed my prices from my dB to Google sheets, the prices were set to update every 30 seconds.

I sourced images of the cards, created some in-app graphics and added some basic sorting in the GlideApp.

The UX seemed decent enough and after a bit of styling, I had a prototype ready to send out to the community.

I spend a lot of time within Pokémon Facebook groups trading cards with others to complete my collections. As a collector, I want to ensure I'm paying a fair price for the cards that I'm buying.

I was encouraged by the community to look through the sold prices of each card on eBay and see what they sell for.

After spending around 2-3 hours sourcing prices for potential trades I realised how inefficient the process so I set out to build a better way.

I spoke to a number of collectors within the Pokémon community to see how they felt about the process. The majority were also frustrated with the amount of time it took to get a fair price.

To test out my intended value proposition I tried to source 50 card prices from 3 different sets. This process took just under an hour including documentation. Laborious!

I wrote a simple tool that extracts values from eBay sales for Pokémon cards. I then cleaned the data using a bunch of exclusions to get a rough price.

Once I had the list I then compared the prices to a bunch of retailers/sellers to determine the accuracy of the pricing.